Year: 2010

I’m just back from the office 2010 roadshow. Phew four cities and six presentations on PowerPivot later back at home with a nice cup of tea and my own bed for the night 😉 A few people asked me how to get hold of the RC0 that I was using on the demo. Well, no…

I’m talking at the SQL Users group on “SCOM for SQL folk”. this session is based on my experiences with SCOM and working to get the product to do what we need it to do for managing SQL performance. Often as a DBA or SQL consultant, SCOM is “forced upon” you by the operations team…

just read an article indicating the some states in the US are making data encryption on disk and on the wire compulsory with some pretty hefty fines (see http://www.sqlmag.com/article/sql-server/A-New-Law-that-Will-Change-the-Way-You-Build-Database-Applications.aspx) This pretty much means that soon you’ll need at least transparent data encryption and protocol encryption on every single SQL Server. Happy days for Microsoft in…

The only local opportunity for advanced SQL training with sqlskills (Paul Randal and Kimberly Tripp) is happening in June/July this. As far as I know this will be the only SQL Immersion in Europe this year. If you are a SQL professional, attending a sqlskills course is really something you can’t miss to progress your…

If you haven’t seen PowerPivot yet, there is a great opportunity at the Office + SharePoint 2010 Roadshow for IT Pros coming to Dublin, Galway, Cork and Belfast. We have been working on making an Irish Centric Demo of PowerPivot along with the great new features in Reporting Services such as map based reports. Hopefully…

I have been on about four engagements in a row this year where we are looking at SQL performance on VMWare or Hyper-V. Here is a list of common things that you can do with virtualisation that may adversely affect SQL performance. Most of them also apply to physical environments, for example if you are…

One annoying thing about working with Hyper-V is you can end up with lots of “hidden” network devices. For example: a) If you installed using a RIS server and legacy NIC b) If you moved a VHD between servers, the NIC gets a new MAC address and device c) If you use clustering and haven’t…

One of the current Technical Limitations of PowerPivot for SharePoint is the fact that the PowerPivot Server must be connected to a domain controller for full functionality. My holy grail has been to get PowerPivot Server working quickly in my humble laptop running Windows Hyper-V R2 – Not so easy when you need to either…

The last topic in the series is entitled “SQL 2008 R2 – Next Generation Business Intelligence”. We hope to cover three main improvements in the SQL 2008 R2 release: a) PowerPivot for Excel b) PowerPivot for SharePoint c) Reporting Enhancements As usual we hope for it to have a lot of demos and the more…

Data compression in SQL 2008 is best for data warehouses, where they tend to be very IO constrained and can take a wee hit on CPU and latency. So how much space will you save with data compression? Well I just took a sample table from our SCOM data warehouse and applied compression. Results are…